[atombender]

Have you gotten any feedback from the core Postgres team about whether any of the improvements might make it into the mainline, or do you think it will remain an extension for ever?

I haven't studied the design super closely, so there might be shortcomings or design compromises that aren't immediately obvious. But from where I'm sitting the performance improvements seem so extreme that it's hard to see why anyone would not want to replace the current MVCC heap with this.

An undo log-based system is essentially the way Oracle structures its core row storage, with each row mutated in place and containing a header listing the chain of transactions currently holding different versions of it. This means you avoid the bloat that comes with Postgres-style MVCC, by sacrificing some read performance whenever someone needs to read a row that has been mutated but not committed, as the reader has to follow the chain to find the old committed version in the undo log. That's always seemed to me to be a better design. Moving the dead tuple bloat away from the main heap and into a separate undo log makes a lot of sense.

But I wonder if the core team, which is famously quite conservative about introducing big changes, sees this as too different to adopt as a replacement for what's been the state of the art since forever.

[kiwicopple]

> But I wonder if the core team, which is famously quite conservative about introducing big changes, sees this as too different to adopt as a replacement

we respect the level of conservatism in Postgres and expect that this could take a while to upstream. we're committed to any timeline and we'll develop it for self-hosters and on the supabase platform first to iron out all the bugs

that said, even if it remains an extension that's fine: as long as the TAM patches land upstream this enables everyone to create storage engines using an extension approach - a very "postgres" way of doing things

you can follow the progress of these patches here:

https://www.orioledb.com/docs#patch-set

[atombender]

I know it can exist just fine as an independent extension. I was asking more about whether you had gotten any signal that the core team was interested at all.

With software projects like these, you often have a somewhat insular core team who isn't particularly amenable to innovations that may be perceived as disruptive or "not invented here" or going against the grain, or for other reasons. With 30+ years fighting the downsides of MVCC vacuums and heap bloat you would think and hope they would be jumping at the opportunity.

The extension system is great. But extensions will always suffer from not being part of the core. For example, if you use a cloud provider like AWS and GCP, you're limited by what extensions are included, as well as their release cadence.

[kiwicopple]

We have made our intentions clear with the core team but also haven’t pushed the agenda much - it’s too early.

The conversations we have had so far are promising, we just need to make sure we approach it the right way. Projects like Oriole have started and sputtered out several times (zheap, for example). The burden first lies on our side to prove that we can see it through to GA, with meaningful usage. They (correctly) shouldn’t need to entertain the maintenance burden until they know the juice is worth the squeeze.

If it’s not accepted into core, we will work with cloud providers to add it as a supported extension

[atombender]

Fair points. Thanks!